Tuesday, 22 December 2009

A monkey stole my bicycle!

When we arrived in Petchaburi for second breakfast, we had already done 36kms and had another 54kms ahead to Ratchaburi. We decided to ride to a cave temple called Wat Tham Khao Luangwhich sits atop a hill 4km south of the city. I particularly wanted to go there as I had heard there is a beautiful sun beam which shines through the opening at most times of day lighting up the Buddha statues contained within.

As we pushed our bikes up the steep road to the temple, we noticed there were lots of monkeys being fed by foreign tourists, so we rode into the temple complex and parked our bikes away from the crowds. Gemma, the CSX veterinarian, offered to wait with the bikes while Chris and I climbed the staircase to the cave.

As I was walking away, I looked back and saw six monkeys converging on Gemma and the bikes. Within seconds monkeys were sitting on our bikes, drinking from our drink bottles, trying to eat my flip flops and trying to rip off the bags from Chris’s bikes. One even stole Gem’s mobile phone.

I don’t like monkeys at the best of times, but went back to try and help out. When Gemma (who loves all animals) picked up a big stick I knew it was bad. We tried to fend them off, but it only antagonized them further and at one point we were being chased away by the ‘big mamma’ monkey. They thought it was funny to push over our bikes one by one, and when they started eyeing off our tyres – enough was enough.

I yelled out ‘Help!’ and a Thai man came running over saying ‘You can’t park your bikes here – it’s the monkey condo’. He screamed at the monkeys, who immediately ran off, dropping our bottles and the mobile phone. This gave us enough time to move the bikes to a safer place, by which time Chris was coming out of the temple saying ‘I thought you were going to fend them off our bikes!”.